Carnegie Moscow Center
To Putin, Trump is a person who has not exactly had anything good to say about Russia, but has at least refrained from attacking or blaming Russia, which has become the norm in America today.
Russians’ high expectations of Donald Trump may be disappointed. Trump and Putin have a lot in common, and Trump’s victory has dashed the hopes of those Russians who believe in American democracy. But the new American president-elect’s unpredictable personality could also make for a stormy relationship.
The Cold War analogy is misleading. Relations between the West and Russia are certainly bad and dangerous now but they are bad and dangerous in new ways.
Nobody in the U.S. believes that relations with Russia will be improved until the kremlin changes its foreign policy course and stops its political rebellion against the system of international relations, established by the United States.
As the U.S. presidential election approaches on November 8, asked three experts, one in Russia, one in the United States, and one in Europe, to comment on the question: “Is the break between the Putin administration and the West permanent?”
Moscow is trying to rattle Washington by projecting its political and military might as the most dangerous crisis develops in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War era. The suspension of the 2000 plutonium agreement may threaten a whole range of nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation treaties.
The Russian leadership has precipitated an even graver confrontation with the United States, abandoning its ambition for a diplomatic leadership role in Syria. The rupture looks like a preemptive strike by Russia in the context of the U.S. election campaign.
So far, Moscow and Washington have proved incapable of ending Syria’s civil war. But a settlement is impossible without them.
Modern western leaders might wish to consider that, in the end, what killed the Soviet system was not Reagan’s Star Wars, or even the scarcity of goods in the shops. What actually did it was the loss of public faith in the domestic political system. So, improve or beware of exposure.
After more than two decades during which Cold War-era visions of nuclear Armageddon faded from public consciousness, alarms are sounding anew as a result of tense relations between Russia and the West.